On 16 January 2026, Samuel Moore, a scholarly communication specialist at Cambridge University Library and also the author of the recently published book titled Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons, was invited as a speaker to the CWTS research seminar. Based on his book, the seminar revisited the idea of scholar-led publishing through a different perspective, which is through the concepts of commons and care.

More than open outputs

Moore started by looking through the history of the open access (OA) movement and contended that its origins were tied to a specific interpretation of the commons—one that heavily emphasizes the free access of resources (in this case, academic journals) in digital space. However, by focusing so narrowly on how publications are accessed, top-down policies like Plan S merely mandated researchers to publish OA. It treats publishing as a commercial activity organized around a logic of choice. As a result, it can be argued that it has not been successful in engaging with how these publications are actually produced. In Moore's view, this oversight is precisely how the broader OA movement was co-opted by commercial publishers, allowing them to exploit the system and maintain their dominant market status unchanged.

Moore offers an alternative by emphasizing the importance of the concepts of commons and care in leading scholar-led initiatives, particularly scholar-led publishing. The concept of the commons here is defined not merely as a matter of making resources accessible, but as a system of production and a community-based mode of organizing, maintaining, and caring for shared scholarly resources. His presentation also highlighted the importance of care in scholar-led publishing, where process, culture, and relationships are valued over outputs, alongside maintenance and repair.

Scaling small and big

Following the presentation, the Q&A session centred on one of the proposed conditions for a desirable OA commons: smallness. Because Moore suggested shifting the focus away from universal access and toward the maintenance of publishing by local communities, seminar attendees discussed the meaning and its necessity of this ‘smallness’ for better scholarly communication. On the one hand, participants acknowledged that it resonates well with studies from sociology of science, which recognize that epistemic communities often function better at a smaller, more manageable size. Attendees also noted the importance of looking beyond Moore’s own UK/European-centric experiences to examine meaningful and successful local OA initiatives in the Global South. On the other hand, participants also highlighted that scalable policy interventions are yet necessary to promote international scholarly communication and its broader public engagement more effectively. Finally, because the global (big) and the local (small) are not mutually exclusive, Moore emphasized the need of experimenting with alternative modes of OA publishing like Radical Open Access Collective in coexistence with the commercialized publishing industry.

For those of us with a keen interest in the current context of the OA publishing landscape in academia, Moore's work is highly relevant. In this blogpost, we would like to further discuss his book and the experimental practices he suggests.

Scholar-led research ecosystem

One of the issues that can be brought up is the sustainability of scholar led publishing, particularly as big proprietary companies are continuously expanding to every stage of research. They offer various services related to assessing research quality and impact, profiling academic experts, and aiding collaboration, among others. Their presence creates user lock-ins which leads to the question: can scholars truly detach themselves from the big proprietary companies? If publishing alone becomes scholar-led while the surrounding infrastructures remain largely owned by proprietary platforms, the dependence will persist. This is why the concept of commons should be extended beyond scholar-led publishing and should inform every phase of the research cycle, including the research information systems that shape planning and decision-making processes across the research system.

Research information plays a crucial role in academia as it shapes decisions about which research is valued, who is hired or promoted, whose work is deemed to have significant scholarly or societal impact, among others. Here, the concepts of commons and care as explained in Moore’s book would allow scholars to reclaim how science is organised, evaluated, and conducted both now and in the future. 

The Open Research Information (ORI) movement, exemplified by the Barcelona Declaration on ORI, provides a concrete illustration of how the research ecosystem can be reimagined. The ORI movement emphasizes that our interests should not be limited to the indicators produced by proprietary platforms, stressing that research information should be treated as a commons and with care. This means that scholars should also pay attention to how research information is produced, managed, and shared, ensuring that it reflects the principles of transparency, fairness, and collective governance. By advocating for open, community-governed research information infrastructures, ORI is then complementary to scholar-led publishing and strengthens options for reducing structural dependence on proprietary platforms.

Commoning beyond publishing

The second issue that can be raised is the current stage of research integrity. In the seminar, Moore cited the current research integrity crisis including fraud, paper mills, and the epidemic of bogus science as evidence for the failure of the current OA commons. We couldn't agree more. Today’s OA publishing landscape is entrenched in a ‘pay-to-publish’ model characterized by skyrocketing and opaque Article Processing Charges (APCs). By taking the initiative to scale up the sheer volume of publications, commercial publishers have ultimately caused the academic communities to lose control over the integrity of scientific literature.

However, we must also recognize that this trend is not only driven by publishers' profit-seeking business models. To use one of Moore’s expressions, without commoning and not caring appropriately for our publishing practices and publications, academic’s obsession with publishing contributes just as well. We often point to the flawed incentive structures within the current research system, which is a valid critique, but it is actually researchers’ strategic adaptation that has directly contributed to this scaling up and compromise of quality. Therefore, the commercialization of academic publishing, which Moore correctly refers to as the main cause of the status quo, is not the only factor to blame, nor is it the only aspect needing reform. Developing viable alternatives and dealing with the current issues in scholarly communication must go hand in hand with transforming academic policy and the culture of ‘publish or perish’.

Commons and care in academia

Under the current OA publishing models, the volume of publicly and freely available scientific literature has increased significantly. However, while it remains unclear if the original promises of the OA movement have paid off enough, academics are experiencing and grappling with multiple crises in scholarly communication from peer review to research integrity. Moore has well-explained this paradox as a result of a problematic understanding and implementation of the commons. In the same vein, his proposal for an alternative seeks to redefine OA commons and shift our focus toward the collective governance of academic publishing. He endeavours to find a path for a new OA commons outside the already heavily commercialized space. This task is by no means easy but would put his words into practice in a meaningful way.

Building on Moore’s vision of publishing beyond the market, we believe that the prevailing issues in our research system can only be solved by treating them as part of a scholarly ecosystem beyond publishing. The scholarly community finds itself trapped not only by publishing venues dominated by for-profit publishers, but also by a heavy reliance on services provided by large proprietary platforms, as well as a research assessment driven by quantitative metrics. Moving away from this situation requires careful consideration, and this blogpost emphasizes two key points. 

First, scholars must recognize that the scholarly world extends beyond publishing, encompassing various infrastructures that support and shape academic work. The concepts of commons and care should therefore extend to all stages of the research process. Initiatives such as ORION, which emphasize coordination and communication among ORI resources, provide a strong example. 

Second, we must bear in mind that solving existing problems in the research system requires simultaneous reforms across these multiple aspects. This demands academics to rethink not only the meaning of publishing research, but also of doing research, being a researcher, and valuing research and researchers within the communities.

Header image: Ugur Peker
DOI: 10.59350/137zh-2kn62 (export/download/cite this blog post)